This spring, students at the University of Virginia changed the process through which the university chooses each year's commencement speaker.
The movement began when some students disagreed with the choice of the 2009 speaker, Harvie Wilkenson, a UVa law school alumnus and federal district judge.
When Quynh Vu, a senior at UVa, heard about Wilkenson in early March, she researched him and found that she did not agree with Wilkenson's rulings and opinions on various minority groups.
Vu believed Wilkenson's writings in the Washington Post about gay marriage were hostile to the UVa LGBTA community and "condescending and inflammatory toward what they were working for."
She also considered his ruling in "Handi vs. Rumsfeld" - a case involving an American citizen detained at Guantanamo Bay - an inappropriate attitude toward Arab minorities.
"We were flabbergasted that he was asked to speak," Vu said. "It's not about him speaking but him speaking at commencement because that's a special time that people only get to have once."
Her roommate Amelia Meyer attempted to discuss the decision with UVa Secretary Board of Visitors Sandy Gilliam; however, he declined the dialogue.
"That's what made me mad," Vu said. "Not just at the speaker but it showed a complete disregard for any criticism or student voice."
Uva's Office of Major Events did not respond to calls from the Collegiate Times.
Currently at UVa, the student representation on the commencement committee consists of the Student Council president, Honor Chair, University Judiciary Committee Chair and fourth-year class president. The Student Council president chooses five additional students.
The entire committee makes a list of 10 potential speakers and passes it to President John Casteen, who chooses from the list or disregard's the committee's offerings and picks a speaker whom he wants to bring to commencement.
Vu had a tough time finding any information on the process to choose the commencement speaker and created an online petition that called for the transparency of the process and more student involvement in the decision-making. The petition currently has 414 signatures.
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An editor wrote this peace of crap, sigh, here's a tip not every sentence needs to be it's own line. There's a crazy technique advanced writers are trying out, what we do is group sentences together based on a common theme and call these groupings "paragraphs." I know what your thinking Sara it's a radical idea, but it gets even crazier. Some people have even taken these "paragraphs" and grouped them together with an introduction and conclusion and use a common thesis mentioned in the introduction to link the "paragraphs" together. They call this far out creation a paper, I know its crazy.
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The heavy hand of political correctness strikes again.
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"Anonymous," while your sarcasm probably enhances your superiority complex, you might try researching newspaper reporting before you judge. In most professional publications, it is common to separate each individual thought into its own paragraph, called a "graph" for short in a news article. Those individual thoughts are often only one sentence because straight-forward articles serve to be concise and informative. Just so you know, your quick-to-judge thoughts really add nothing to the intellectual conversation regarding the topic of this article.
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Mike you must not know the burden of being smarter than most people. I see what you are saying but if you look up at the article most of those sentences should not have been separated into their own paragraph. Her writing is lazy and childish. Here's a few lines put together without any text being changed. "Todd explained that the committee wanted to create more transparency about commencement and that every final decision was posted on the Web site as it developed. Todd said she did not feel like the students were underrepresented on a panel that contained only one student member. "If they have questions about student representation, I never felt like I couldn't say anything," Todd said. However, she agreed that an increased student representation would be useful."Obviously the more input we could have the better," Todd said. "I don't know how the process would work to suggest that. I believe that if more students wanted to have more of a voice I'm sure that they would hear that." Do you understand my grievance now Mike those sentences should not have been separated they are a paragraph but miss edgy editor wrote this article like a twitter post.
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its Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and it should not be surrounded by quotation marks. do you guys actually edit these things?
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Go get em Quynh! You should never have to listen to someone whose opinions you don't like! It doesn't matter if they're accomplished federal judges, you're obviously smarter and better than all of them! This is why everyone hates UVA.
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Enlighten us to the ways of news reporting 101 and write for the CT. The world will be a million times better for it. Please don't deprive us from your overwhelming talent. What a tool...
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She padded that article by making each sentence its own paragraph. If you arrange them correctly its a laughably short news story. You object but someone has to call her out for lazy writing and from the sound of things I bet you work for the CT. The only people I've witnessed defend this rag are the staff.
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@ anonymous below, well, you're actually AT CT's website if that's any news for ya... What do you expect?
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